Renewal Time

ES'KIA MPHAHLELE (1919-2008) is celebrated both as the Father of African Humanism and one of the founding figures of modern African literature. Born in Pretoria and baptized Ezekiel, he lived as Es'kia from the age of five with his paternal grandmother in a village in GaMphahlele (now Lepelle-Nkumpi Municipality) in Limpopo Province, where he herded cattle and goats. When he was twelveyears old his mother took Es'kia and his two siblings to live with her in Marabastad, a black township near Pretoria - to Second Avenue, the location of one of his best-known books. Here he encountered reading via Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote as well as the subtitles of silent movies of the 1930s, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, film cowboys, and Tarzan. Only at the age of 15 did Mphahlelebegin to attend school regularly. He finished high school by private study and obtained a First-Class Pass at the Junior Certificate level (1940), and in 1943 received his Joint Matriculation Board Certificate from the University of South Africa (UNISA). He became a teacher and journalist at Drum Magazine, but continued studying for his BA (1949) and MA in 1957. As a teacher he protested against the introduction of Bantu Education, and in December 1952 he was dismissed along with other activists from his post and later banned from teaching anywhere in South Africa by the apartheid government. This led him into exile. The 1959 publication of his autobiographical novel Down Second Avenue drew worldwide interest in Mphahlele as a writer and focused a powerful spotlight on the internal dynamics of South Africa as it steadily drifted toward greater racial oppression and greater world isolation. Now a classic of African literature, Down Second Avenue was translated into French, German, Russian, Italian, Dutch,Hebrew, and Japanese (among other languages), reflecting the impact and international popularity of the book. Mphahlele's second novel, The Wanderers (1968) was a story chronicling the experience of South Africa's exiles, reflecting his own travels in Nigeria and Ghana(1957-61), followed by France (1961-63), Kenya (1963-66), Colorado USA (1966-74), Philadelphia (1974-77) until he tried to return to South Africa with his wife and children. From the 1960s onward his novels, essays and stories, and even quoting him, had been banned under the Internal Security Act, and the banning was only partially lifted after his return from December 1978. It was a dangerous and oppressive time in South Africa: black school children in Soweto had resisted apartheid in 1976 in bloody riots, and Steve Biko was killed in police custody in 1977. Back in South Africa, Mphahlele was turned down for a professorship and became an inspector of schools, while his wife Rebecca found work in her field of social work. In 1979, he joined the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) as a senior research fellow, founding its department of African Literature in 1983, a first for South African education. He became the institution's first black professor. His late autobiographical work Es'kia (2001) was shortlisted for the London Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-fiction, and this was followed by another series of essays, Es'kia Continued (2004). He died aged 88 in Lebowakgomo, Limpopo, not far from where he hadstarted herding goats and cattle as a child.